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Researchers at the Centre for Bioelectric Interfaces and the Centre for Cognition & Decision Making of the Higher School of Economics utilized electroencephalogram (EEG) and the event-related potential (ERP) technique to study neural activity during simultaneous interpretation of continuous prose. Using event-related potentials as an index of depth of attention to the sounding fragment, the researchers assessed the competition between memory and auditory perception during simultaneous interpretation. The results of the study were published in the journal PLoS ONE.

HSE University is pleased to announce an international competition for experimental research laboratories in such breakthrough fields of contemporary physics as Quantum Technologies and Novel Functional Materials. The winners will have a chance to head and develop new research laboratories based out of the HSE Faculty of Physics.

This paper discusses the morphological and syntactic means of expression of participants in morphology and syntax of West Circassian (Adyghe) focusing on the argument vs adjunct characteristics of these means. West Circassian provide evidence for the non-discretness of the argument/adjunct contrast but also shows the necessity to distinguish between argument/adjunct properties in morphological expressions and in syntactic expressions.

Optative is an inflected verb form dedicated to the expression of the wish of the speaker. Caucasian languages tend to have morphologically specialized forms to convey this meaning. The purpose of this paper is to explore the volitional domain basing on an analysis of the Optatives in 16 Caucasian languages, including 15 East Caucasian languages and one Turkic language of Daghestan
(Kumyk). The paper provides typological arguments for distinguishing between two different kinds of optatives. Performative Optative is dedicated to the expression of blessings and curses, while Desiderative Optative expresses a Џpowerless wishђ of the speaker (his/her dreams, longings etc.).

This paper describes a pilot experiment which was conducted by the authors with speakers of the polysynthetic West Circassian (Adyghe) language and aimed at investigating their ability to use complex verb forms that cross-reference several arguments introduced by applicative morphology. The results of the experiment support the view that complex polysynthetic words can be constructed in the course of speech and do not necessarily belong to any common inventory of word forms. In addition, we make several conclusions which concern productivity of applicatives and their order within the West Circassian verb.

This paper discusses peculiarities of relativization in Shapsug Adyghe, a variety of the polysynthetic Adyghe language belonging to the Northwest Caucasian family. In general, Adyghe relative constructions display a number of interesting phenomena such as morphological marking of the target role, relativization of several arguments within a single construction, and an internally-headed relative construction with the semantic head being marked by a specific exponent. The Shapsug variety i) presents evidence against the contrast between finite forms and participles, which was proposed for the language in most descriptions, ii) restricts relativization of possessors to possessors of absolutive arguments, and iii) displays typologically unique internally-headed constructions with internal heads marked by the external case. It is suggested that these peculiarities actually highlight certain properties of the Adyghe relative constructions that remain implicit in the standard language.

This paper describes the repetitive prefix in Agul (Lezgic, East Caucasian), focusing on the grammaticalization path of this morpheme. The main question to be addressed is the hypothesis that the prefix has been copied from the closely related Lezgian language.

In Standard Average European (SAE), addressees of speech verbs are marked with dative or, in languages lacking cases, with dative-like prepositions. This merger is commonly explained through a metaphor: the information transferred in a speech act is said to be construed as the object being transferred, or Theme, and the addressee as its Recipient. This status of the addressee as a derived concept, a metaphor of the Recipient, and its dative marking in many languages rather than in SAE alone, is the reason why the addressee is usually not considered to be a separate semantic role. Based on data from East Caucasian languages that use different marking for Recipients and addressees of speech, I argue that speech addressees constitute a separate semantic role, also an animate Goal, but not a metaphor of the Recipient. Focusing on case marking assigned by the main speech verb, speech acts are shown to be construed in East Caucasian as spatial configurations: the crucial component is their directedness towards the addressee. In the conclusion, I come back to SAE and question the status of the dative addressees. Taking into account that the dative often develops from lative markers, it is suggested that, in the languages with dative addressees, one should also consider an alternative to the conventional explanation: merging the Recipient and the addressee in one marking may result not from a metaphorical extension but from formal under-specification of two different animate Goals.

This study deals with the phenomenon of multilingualism so common in the areas of a high level of language density. The research was carried out in Daghestan in one of the many spots where languages from several different groups of the East Caucasian family are spoken. Through retrospective interviews (Dobrushina 2013), we investigate whether the ability to speak the language of the neighbors has changed over the last one hundred years.